Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the mantle of Noted Film-maker can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the beneficial side, it can act as a safeguard: when viewing the works of an ennobled director through this prism, cinema analysts may feel pressured to make excuses for even their weakest efforts. (The rationale is that a disappointing film by a Renowned Director is still better than the best work of a commercial director.) One disadvantage is that such accolades can confine a creative to a constrained space, seeking out material befitting a Noted Film-maker; another is that the frustration when a project falls flat is even more pronounced. A high-profile test case has made its way to Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a minor effort that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one recognition this season: that for Most Notable Misfire.
Retracing the Director's Steps
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must look back at Bigelow's career. Bigelow established her acclaim with a succession of expansive, limber genre pics: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, cop thriller Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. Clearer indication of her direction of travel came with the overlooked 1995 film Strange Days, an gripping sci-fi suspense story, shaped by the Rodney King incident, which also served as a moral story about the risks of escaping from the real world to take cover in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her screenwriter/ex-husband James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet after the events of 2001, with her fame expanding, Bigelow – like her homeland – was pushed into a reactive stance. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the period following the Charlottesville events, entered into a contentious dialogue with the country’s long history of racism.
One can appreciate why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – authored by Noah Oppenheim, the previous news executive who wrote Netflix’s new project featuring De Niro Zero Day – and why the platform would enthusiastically stump for a atomic anxiety film after Oppenheimer’s Oscars sweep. (One concept for the new film: a contemporary version of Oppenheimer?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its most compelling early on, depicting in near real-time the 19 minutes in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by unknown parties is picked up on screens of a American military installation in Alaska and reported to the executive briefing area, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim quickly raise the tension while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re set to wondering where this full-length production can possibly proceed once the countdown clock hits zero.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is a revisit of the opening: the film subsequently shuffles between the angles of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ general, secretary of defence Jared Harris and commander-in-chief Idris Elba) the introduction only partially revealed. Structurally, the film can’t develop: it’s a lengthy film with a minimal narrative arc, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment again and again, every iteration adding on debated technical details while inching everyone nearer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a firm hold on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Esteemed Director, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were definitionally all consequence. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the drama gets interesting at the very second the film fades to black. The figures are left wondering: “Is that it?” We are, too, for separate causes.
Stylistic and Conceptual Issues
While the plot cycles in diminishing returns, like a bleak repetitive cycle, we’ve sufficient moments to ponder the deleterious effect Netflix money has had on the look of U.S. films. Even on the large screen, Dynamite seemed uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings recycling the same sets, up to and including Zero Day. If Bigelow the Noted Visual Film-maker vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Noted Feminist Film-maker: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as possibly one more of this director’s strong female professionals, exits prematurely, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The energy Bigelow infused into her grittier initial successes is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the artist felt she had to restrain her bold choices, but a script this verbose required some balancing visual flair.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The fear A House of Dynamite most strongly conjures, then, isn’t global eradication, but a filmmaker's fear of being deemed insufficient; stiffening and almost petrifying as it goes along, it’s understandable the film should have been eclipsed by recent, recontextualising events. What this screenplay assumes is that those holding roles of command would be skilled experts, fundamentally diligent and that the greatest danger to Chicago in the latter part of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like intensely involved commentaries on their era, Dynamite – the initial of this director’s recent works to fall in a gray area of afterthought, distraction and outright irrelevance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the rogue missile first appears on sensors, the America Bigelow’s film describes has been destroyed utterly.
